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New York, 1:58 AM
Tue Nov 10
55 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/30/09
10/31/09
But at least I'm employed! #shutupcollege
10/30/09
What. The. Fuck. #shutupcollege
10/30/09
I might have broken down and said "JUST LEAVE NOW" and then sobbed quietly in the empty conference room. #shutupcollege
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10/30/09
I work in the system. You can't imagine the lack of academic skills and basic knowledge we see from recent h.s. grads. Astounding. #shutupcollege
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10/20/09
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10/20/09
Initially, he seems to challenge the assumptions of this post:
“Rather than trying to come up with a subsistence-based poverty measure about which everybody can agree, we should accept that there is no definitive way to decide who is impoverished and who isn’t. Every three years, researchers from the federal government conduct surveys about the number of appliances in the homes of American families. In 2001, ninety-one per cent of poor families owned color televisions; seventy-four per cent owned microwave ovens; fifty-five per cent owned VCRs; and forty-seven per cent owned dishwashers. Are these families poverty-stricken?”
But as the article progresses, Cassidy brings together evidence from numerous disciplines to show how “relative privation” hurts people psychologically, socially, and even physically. The basic idea: “It appears that, while money matters to people, their relative ranking matters more. ... Relative deprivation is also bad for your health.”
How to assess relative privation? “Since relative deprivation confers many of the disadvantages of absolute deprivation, it should be reflected in the poverty statistics. A simple way to do this would be to classify a household as impoverished if its pre-tax income was, say, less than half the median income—the income of the household at the center of the income-distribution curve.”
In the current political climate, his thoughts on the redistribution of wealth would inevitably raise the specter of socialism: “The conservative case against a relative-poverty line asserts that since some people will always earn less than others the relative-poverty rate will never go down. Fortunately, this isn”t necessarily true. If incomes were distributed more equally, fewer families would earn less than half the median income. Therefore, the way to reduce relative poverty is to reduce income inequality—perhaps by increasing the minimum wage and raising taxes on the rich.”
*John Cassidy, Annals of Economics, “Relatively Deprived,” The New Yorker, April 3, 2006 (link).
10/20/09
However, unlike many truly poor people, my poverty is temporary. Once I graduate with my MBA in December from my no-name school, I'll be making the big bucks....right?
*crickets* #thepoors
10/20/09
In the current economy, a lot of people who are leaving school have to settle for work that may not be related to or commensurate with their academic qualifications. All I can say is: good luck, and work your connections. #thepoors
10/20/09
But...
"we have far more honest priests than thieving priests"
Qualify that. Go ahead, punk. Make my day. #thepoors
09/16/09
09/16/09
does this metaphor help: the tumor is no longer growing.
and i'm not saying i agree with the fed, i'd have to say that i don't really know. i work for myself, and i am seeing a little uptick in business after a dismal and terrifying summer.